Look for a lobster emoji to surface this year

08 February 2018

The story was reported by Portland, Maine news station WMTW following an announcement by the Unicode Consortium (the emoji-governing body), which says that it will add the crustacean in its next round of updates.

Sen. Angus Kingtweeted about the development with emojis of his own. "Thanks to @unicode for recognizing the impact of this critical crustacean, in ME and across the country", King wrote in a Tweet.

Unicode, a nonprofit organization that promotes consistency in computer coding, said Wednesday the lobster emoji was among more than 150 picked to be added in the next round of emojis.

The senator signed the tweet with the emojis of a cow and a king, symbolizing his name. Apple and Google make the actual emoji images themselves, leading to occasional controversies, such as Google's inability to build a decent burger. Apple typically updates its emoji in the fall after new iOS releases, a year ago we saw the 10.0 emoji update arrive in October.

King supplied data from Google searches and Instagram hashtags, indicating that searches for "lobster" and "lobster emoji" were significantly higher than those for "crab", arguably the icon most similar in shape and color.

It's one of 157 new emoji being released to smartphones everywhere in the second half of 2018, according to Emojipedia.